Pro-choice, but with open eyes, heavy heart

After forcing myself to watch what are now eight ghoulish videos exposing what goes on behind closed doors at Planned Parenthood, I’m still pro-choice.

I’m also anguished, despite the latest news conference raising questions about the videos. I guess that was the point of this extensive investigation by the Center for Medical Progress.

While attending college, I became pro-choice for three reasons. First, I bought the line that the procedures should be legal, safe and rare. Second, I was repulsed by the tactics of the pro-life movement, which included threatening doctors and bombing clinics. Third, I adopted the feminist gospel that, as a man, I couldn’t tell a woman what to do with her body.

For three decades, with minor refinements, against partial-birth abortions and in favor of waiting periods and parental notification, I remained pro-choice. I stuck to it, even though the women I most love, my wife and my mother, are unflinchingly pro-life.

Until the Planned Parenthood videos. It’s no wonder that defenders of the organization keep spinning that the footage was “heavily edited.” The material is heavily disturbing. Doctors and other personnel callously discuss the street value of fetal organs and negotiate prices like car salesmen.

Especially chilling is the testimony of Holly O’Donnell, a former procurement technician at California-based StemExpress, which until recently did business with Planned Parenthood. According to O’Donnell, in the poor and minority neighborhoods where Planned Parenthood sets up shop, every free pregnancy test is a potential abortion and every pregnancy is, for companies like the one she worked for, a potential stash of specimens. So while the organization provides different services, many of them lead back to abortion.

The organ harvesters visited my hometown of Fresno. I know what kind of women go to those places, and most of them are poor Latina immigrants who did not come to the United States with the intent of getting pregnant, much less having an abortion.

After one abortion, O’Donnell recalls seeing what she describes as “the most gestated fetus and the closest thing to a baby I’ve seen.” It had a heartbeat. It was alive. Then it wasn’t.

These videos are just evil enough to raise doubts and change minds. I find myself envying those who are free of doubt and whose minds are made up.

Like my mother, who doesn’t mince words when discussing abortion. For her, there’s a life. Someone ends it. That’s murder. Of course, murder is illegal. Abortion isn’t. But my mother isn’t interested in sanitizing the debate with word play that lets folks wipe their hands clean.

It’s just as well. As the Planned Parenthood videos illustrate, some hands never come clean.

Ruben Navarrette is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and author of A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano.